How does Meteor fit in to all of this?
Are no YC startups that you polled using it? Why not?
Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?
21–30 of 77 posts
Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?
#22I wouldn't draw a strong conclusion about 'larger' startups using Backbone instead of Angular based on this data. There is probably some high correlation between a startup's size and age... Older startups are likely to be larger, and are likely to have started their stack using the popular framework of the time (Backbone). Newer startups will be smaller, and were founded at a time when new frameworks (e.g. Angular) a…
You may well be right but just to add a small data point in the other direction: I'm solo founding a new start up right now and chose to go with Marionette (which is essentially Backbone + some very handy batteries). Its been bliss (and this is coming from a backend guy who normally loathes frontend programming in JS).
I'm not saying people aren't still choosing Backbone/variants today, just that 2 years ago, Angular was (1) not a nearly as viable an option and (2) not nearly as well known; so any time /company-size correlation will push the results in one direction.
edit: although interestingly, looking at the respective wikipedia entries, AngularJS has an initial release listed in 2009, Backbone.js is listed as October, 2010
Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?
#23I have used both in my startup job and vastly prefer angular to backbone, however I think it's not quite an apples to apples comparison as angular provides a lot more than backbone.
That isn't meant as a criticism of backbone per se, rather I think they are actively going for different things - backbone makes it easy to achieve a client-side rendered single page website with MVC separation but lets you control actual rendering and data binding, i.e. maximal control, whereas angular allows you to do the same thing but provides 2-way data binding, code/html reuse via directives [0], local scoping of data on DOM elements [1], dependency injection [2], vastly improved testability [3] and lots more.
My experience of actually developing websites with both is that angular is a better experience and involves a hell of a lot less boilerplate than backbone and even though, when it doesn't work, it can be infuriating it is net a simply amazing framework.
Obviously I'm very biased and by my own admission my understanding of both is limited and I am certainly not the best developer ever blah, so take this with a pinch of salt. I think if you need maximal fine-grained control over the behaviour of your website while getting help with MVP you're better off with backbone, but in any other situation use angular (or possibly batteries-included alternatives like ember.js or knockout.js - I have no experience with them so can't comment there.)
[0]: http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive
[1]: http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$rootScope.Scope
Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?
#24How does Meteor fit in to all of this? Are no YC startups that you polled using it? Why not?
The question about frameworks in the original poll was worded like this:
Are you using a client-side MV* framework? (Angular.js, Backbone.js, Ember.js etc) If so, which one?
So it's possible that Meteor users didn't feel they could answer. However, it was open ended, so people filled in other frameworks, like Derby.js.
Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?
#25How does Meteor fit in to all of this? Are no YC startups that you polled using it? Why not?
Currently using Meteor for my startup, I foresee scalability issues down the line (which the meteor devs are currently working on) but for cranking out a MVP its a pretty nice framework.
Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?
#26I have used both in my startup job and vastly prefer angular to backbone, however I think it's not quite an apples to apples comparison as angular provides a lot more than backbone. That isn't meant as a criticism of backbone per se, rather I think they are actively going for different things - backbone makes it easy to achieve a client-side rendered single page website with MVC separation but lets you control actual…
After spending two or three months with Angular, I’m running away screaming. I really owe people a blog post about it, but basically, it’s hard to debug, weird for weird’s sake, and polluting of the HTML namespace. Death by a thousand cuts — and by disregard for best practice.
Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?
#27Joose js to create classes!! The best!
Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?
#28I've played with both and I honestly still don't feel comfortable with computing the view on the client side instead of in my code on the server. Most of the form factors we use regularly to access HTML5 type applications are in flux. Today we see the latest quad-core Snapdragon that screams across the silicon leaving empty battery cells in its wake. Tomorrow may be a battery friendly OS that sacrifices resources in…
I've been wondering about client side vs server side view rendering as well. I am used to working with server side MVC frameworks so rendering the view client side is a bit odd to me. Is the ability for the end user to see some of the view markup (conditional statements, loops, etc) an issue?
Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?
#29On a recent project I used pjax, because it was way simpler to figure out what the heck was going on, and it did not have a bunch of extra stuff that was difficult. Angular seemed very nice - until I tried to do something that it did not foresee and... wow... things get complicated really fast when you do that.
What were you trying to do?
http://www.grobmeier.de/angular-js-binding-to-jquery-ui-date...
Sums up what I wanted to do. I think in this particular instance things have moved on and it may be easy these days, but thinking about what would have happened if I'd had to figure out that code myself, I could envision spending a day or two figuring out how to add something that is a one-liner in jQuery. It made me nervous about "unknown unknowns", too, whereas pjax is pretty easy to reason about.
Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?
#30At https://starthq.com we use Angular. Here's a talk I gave that's both an introduction to Angular and a summary of our experiences: http://video.yandex.by/users/fdconf/view/4/ (slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/olegp/oleg-podsechinfrontendconf)